Safari Roof Rack

Hunting Equipment

Striking point. Makes a lot of sense. Keep up the good work.

Engaging opinion. I’m not sure everyone would see it that way.

Engaging opinion. I’m not sure everyone would see it that way.

“Apparently we don’t think heterosexuality is worthy of special legal treatment anymore.”

Why the apparently, are your rights infringed by my marriage to my partner, or would you prefer your ‘Commonwealth’ to discriminate against me?

“Increasingly large proportion of middle class Americans can’t afford health care, it’s not just a problem of the indigent any more”…
Why checks and balances do not work in this case to fix the situation? Why so many people are not happy with it, but there is no action taken?

Some of the people above have argued that government should be out of the marriage business completely — that everything should be contractual agreements between two (or N parties). That’s a really difficult thing to do. Civil marriage involves an enormous number of rights and responsibilities. (The GAO found 1049 federal statutes affected by marital status, see http://www.gao.gov/archive/1997/og97016.pdf. States generally have a few hundred laws affected by marital status.)

It’s not just the volume of laws that makes it tricky. It’s relatively easy to get someone to accept an individual *right* currently associated with civil marriage. (Want my Social Security benefits after I die? Sure you do.) However, it’s much harder to get someone to accept the *responsibilities* associated with civil marriage (Want the legal responsibility for my debts? For taking care of me in my old age? Didn’t think so.) By bundling all the rights and responsibilities into one package, it’s more tractable.

If you truly wanted to “privatize” marriage, I think you’d need to bundle each right with a responsibilitiy. (For example, you can have my Social Security benefits if and only if you also promise to take care of me in my old age.) That would be a real mess.

There are also a whole class of laws that I’m not sure I want to be split out individually. I don’t see an easy way to deal with spousal immigration, for example. (Do I get one “immigration right” in my lifetime that I can use for anybody? Can I sell it if I fall in love with another American?) Spousal immunity from testifying is also something that I’d be leery of allowing people to swap around with ease with just anybody.

Okay, back to Philip’s main point about extending marriage rights to poly arrangements…

The poly flag has been raised just about EVERY time there has been a change in marriage rights — especially with Loving vs. Virginia in 1967, where the Supreme Court said it was okay for interracial couples to marry. And yet, even with all the changes in marriage over the centuries, extending the number of people married has never been a real issue.

The poly argument makes the assumption that the limits on spousal *gender* are somehow linked to the limits on spoual *number*. They are not. Just as removing the restriction on race didn’t change the consanguinity or age restrictions, there’s no reason to believe that remove the restriction on gender will change the number restriction.

Also, if you look at the history of the changes in marriage, marriage has become progressively more and more equitable in terms of gender. This includes things like how married women were given the right to own property in their own name (1839, Louisiana Territory) all the way through divorced and widowed women being allowed to keep their credit rating (1979). In the entire history of the United States, there have been *no* changes in marriage related to the number of spouses except to *decrease* the number of allowed wives (Utah, 1890).

There are also some practical reasons why it’s not likely.

First, it’s hard enough to write laws that are fair and equitable when two people are concerned; it would be a nightmare to try and write laws that worked for multiple spouses. Health insurance is only the tiniest little piece of it. I don’t see an way to write child custody laws or alimony laws in a multiway relationship that is even mostly fair to all the participants in even most situations.

Second, our society just isn’t very poly. Societies with polygymous marriage are uniformly pretty rigidly patriarchical: one husband, lots of wives who are subserviant to him. It seems to me that as women get more rights and more power, they basically just don’t settle for that kind of relationship any more (in general).

Third, our society is less willing to make commitments in general than many others. I suspect that this has to do in part with the increase in lifespan. If you figured you and your spouse were likely to die before 40, then you only had to worry about whether you could put up with him/her for 20 years, not 80. While I am very happily married now, it was extremely difficult for me to muster up the courage to make a lifetime committment to ONE man — I can’t begin to imagine finding the courage to make lifetime committments to a whole bunch of people. I really doubt that there would be many people who would do that.

So, in short, it would take an enormous amount of pain to rewrite the numerous marriage laws to accomodate a very very small minority.

As for the healthcare issue, I think the biggest problem is that the US government is much more heavily influenced by corporate campaign spending than many other western governments, which inhibits their ability to take any measures that would decrease the cost of healthcare and thus decrease the income for the companies they get so much money from. It has been rumored that this is called corruption in certain other parts of the world.

As far as the marriage thing goes, it’s a questionable thing whether a government should sanction and promote specific forms of human relationships at all. Some say that by imposing heterosexual monogamous marriage as a standard, more stable situations for raising children ensue, but that position is hardly tenable with the current 50% divorce rate (and the hetero part of it is quite obviously a bogus requirement). One could even argue that if there were less of a pre-imposed standard on the way people organize relationships, and people would thus be forced to think about how they should shape theirs (monogamous? open? communal?), children would be better off. That does, however, presuppose that people are able to think about such issues rationally; if they aren’t, maybe strong societal expectations and government incentives to go with them are benificial after all.

Dane,

To misquote Tina Turner: “What’s God got to do, got to do with it?”